Caring attention is the deathless; inattention is death.
The attentive do not die; the inattentive are as though dead.
– Dhammapada, verse 21. Translated by Christopher J. Ash
I heard recently of a five-year-old crying in anguish – “I don’t want to die.” Conceiving he would die, he conceived the cessation of his ‘I.’ In another instance, I saw a video of five-year-old, inconsolable because she realizes that her precious, little, baby brother is going to change; going to grow up. “I don’t want him to grow up,” she keens. By conceiving of a yet-to-come, she anguishes over the loss of what-is. She wants him to remain a baby, “because he is so cute,” she cries. It’s unthinkably painful – he won’t stay the way he is. Then she takes it further. Through her tears, she laments: “And I don’t want to die when I’m a hundred!”
These two instances got me thinking about other occasions when I’ve heard of children expressing that particular anguish. Most of us in the West (if not all) have a disowned child in us just like that, a child who once lamented, aloud or inwardly: “I don’t want to die.” If, as children, we spoke it out loud, the adults around us didn’t know what to say and likely only feed us the usual, meaningless, placatory cover-ups.
After all, they had not come to terms with the inevitable fact of death, either; so how could they have helped? They were uncomfortable in their lack of capacity to answer us. At best, due to their love, they touched into a pool of pain, helplessly witnessing the anguish of our innocence. Perhaps they treated our existential dilemma as cute (and videoed it). The little girl in the video – her father dismissed the experience, saying that she had a breakdown. My point is, the fact of death is not usually explored carefully, nor acknowledged openly.
All in all, adult fear of the subject aids children to create disowned parts of themselves. They get on with growing up, and learn to hide the inconsolable lament away. In our culture, we don’t teach our children to respect the great matters of death, separation and loss. We avoid encountering the natural realization that death separates us from what is ever, ever so dear to us.
Edna St. Vincent Millay names the suppression of existential anguish. The middle section of her poem, Childhood is the Kingdom where Nobody Dies has the following lines. After acknowledging that cats die, she then says:
You fetch a shoe-box, but it’s much too small, because she won’t curl up now:
So you find a bigger box, and bury her in the yard, and weep.
But you do not wake up a month from then, two months
A year from then, two years, in the middle of the night
And weep, with your knuckles in your mouth, and say Oh, God! Oh, God!
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies that matters,
— mothers and fathers don’t die.
It’s unthinkable – but, what kind of ‘unthinkable’ is that? How big will we let the unthinkable be in us? How come we aren’t talking to each other about this, now that we’re grown? How come we aren’t learning to have our feelings about this? How come we aren’t wondering more openly, fully, together, “Who or what dies?” (That, by the way, is a title of another of Stephen Levine’s books: “Who Dies?”) “The attentive do not die.” What did the Nikāya Buddha mean?
How come we aren’t rushing with open arms toward the exploration of consciousness, that incredible unfathomable presence of knowing which resides in the human heart? Are we afraid of a meltdown? What will melt down, break down, or otherwise dissolve?
Why aren’t we exploring these questions? One answer is simply: the sheer momentum from years of turning the other way. “Don’t think about unthinkable things” is a rule. We humans are amazingly adept at compartmentalizing, so the unresolved encounters with the big questions get walled off (the dynamics of which walling-off, I’ll go into later). So, my point here is that childhood training helps the broader society’s ‘Don’t-Think-the-Unsayable’ project.
So, publication of Stephen’s A Year to Live was a brave counter-cultural service. By opening up the conversation, by bringing the hidden to light, we can increase the richness of our ordinary daily experience. If we have cultivated the habit of inattention, how can we be grateful for and nurture the good in us, in a grounded way?
I don’t think that the little girl in the video had a breakdown, at all. I think it perfectly healthy that she spoke her heart out clear as day (and night): “I don’t want to die when I’m a hundred!” Maybe, if those feelings could be received deeply by those around her, and flow through her, then, ten, twenty or thirty years later, she could settle down to the life-expanding koan: ‘Who dies?’